“Old Love”

Last March I questioned novelist Louis Begley’s grim assessment of the “awful discontents” of his and his mother’s later years. How surprising and pleasing, then, to come across this paean to his wife of many years in yesterday’s New York Times. It tells how the “handiwork of time” has enabled him to become more worthy of her, and to love her – and much else about his life – better and more deeply as the decades passed.